You should know I’m obsessed with videosongs.

The rules of videosonging are very simple:

1. What you see is what you hear

2. If you hear it, at some point you see it

If anything, I have broken the rules here because it’s not really quite a song. It is a piece of music, certainly, but not something you’ll be singing to yourself later (though if you are a drummer, you might end up with the beat in your ear for a few minutes). Still. The principle is sound.

And that’s it. I’m really happy I decided to spend a few hours last night working on this, because otherwise it wouldn’t have posted until probably 2am. As it is, I’m afforded a bit of time to actually enjoy Twelfth Night. And, you know, eat something. Which I haven’t really remembered to do today.

Thanks for watching. Hopefully I’ll keep up with this space a bit better. Though I’ve said that many, many times before.

“Huh.”

“What?”

“It’s the new episode of Jigsaw.”

“What about it?”

“It’s… it’s like he didn’t spend nearly as much time on it or something.”

“What, so it’s fairly concise?”

“No, I mean — well, yes, actually. Maybe that’s it.”

Went back to work today. Had to film after. No time! No time!

Drumming tomorrow. I apologize in advance if it’s late.

I forgot how long and hard split-screen stuff was.

Taping down the tripod so nothing moves. Fixing the focus. Locking everything down as tight as possible. Thinking all the blocking through in multiple dimensions. It’s a little hard to get everything set, especially when you’re like me and you refuse to bother with storyboarding.

On the other hand, when it comes to the actual filming, when everything is all finally crystalized, it often only takes one take. Three hours of planning, eight minutes of filming.

I’ve been really enjoying this project from the standpoint of bringing back things about the show that got lost somewhere (and by “somewhere,” read “in my attempt to create normal TV-style content and expand into realms I didn’t sincerely want to go”). There’s been a purposeful focus on old stand-by situations that haven’t been around as much in season four. Milton and Kranium banter (including the cry of “Mil-tooooooon” that helps me find Kranium’s voice before every shoot). Kranium talking on the phone. Lump listening to the radio. Toy theater (the first instance of which was all the way back in season one, and I didn’t even know it was called “Toy Theater” at the time). Somewhere along the way when planning season four, I forgot that I was more interested in characters than in a story that makes sense, or at least in a story that lasts longer than one episode. A focus on continuity makes it hard to keep myself entertained. Which might be seen as a failure, I suppose. But I’m okay with that.

Which isn’t to say that these things are the most popular elements of Jigsaw. Just the things I enjoy doing the most. Which has to count for something.

Where does this leave season four? No idea. After this I’ll probably take a few months off (due to producing/directing duties at work), finishing off season four on an irregular schedule starting maybe mid-March and going until early June. Unless, of course, I come up with a bunch of ideas, in which case I’ll just start filming. I’m not terribly concerned about keeping up a regular schedule with the rest of the season; rather, focusing on taking a decent amount of time to make each episode as good as it can be. I know I can do the regular schedule thing with pretty good success. Instead of stretching myself in the direction of mainstream TV, I should maybe just think about how I can increase the quality, and punch up the funny.

Pipers tomorrow. Drummers on Wednesday. Then, rest.

Compressing the entirety of my thoughts on gender and race in media into four minutes is, of course, impossible. Certainly impossible to do in any sort of entertaining way. It’s just too complex an issue, and there are too many howevers. I hesitate to say it’s a complicated issue, because it’s more a large system of very simple issues, linked at odd angles.

I think the content of this episode serves as a somewhat fair summary of the beginning of my thoughts, if not on gender in media, at least gender on Jigsaw in particular. The issue of female characters has been on my mind for years, and I’m still not entirely sure how to address it long-term. The real question for me is not gender, but collaboration. If I’m going to bring anybody on-board as a regular or even irregular character (i.e. a puppeteer who actually voices their own puppet), it needs to be somebody with whom I can banter in the same manner as the existing cast do. These people exist, but it does take a bit of sacrifice to arrange it. It’s always been on my list of Things I Want. Just hasn’t happened yet.

In terms of technical aspects of this episode, this was the first time I’ve ever done a true two-camera shoot. Thanks to the fact that I brought the Flip home from work, I was able to cut back and forth (after the laborious process of synching the sound). Of course, I didn’t have the idea to treat it like a two-camera shoot until after I filmed, so the framing was a little odd. I decided not to care, since, well, there’s only so much Ninth Day of Xmas left in which to post a video. So.

Comments, as always, are encouraged.

I’m not entirely sure what to tell you here.

I certainly have my concerns. While I don’t think I ever actually say or do anything explicitly in this episode that is inappropriate for younger viewers, I… well, it’s certainly implied. Heavily. It’s just plain dirty, there’s no way around it. I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to do this, whether I wanted to risk offending the parents of my younger viewers.

And then I thought, well, they stuck with me when I had Milton and, subsequently, his disembodied arm, go on a spree of debauchery. These Theoretical Parents haven’t gotten uptight about all the drinking. I give them product that is free of swearing and violence. They can deal with a little heavy innuendo. Or they can’t, and they’ll stop watching, though I can guarantee it’s nothing too far from what their kids are probably doing with their Barbie dolls.

At the end of the day, I just thought it was really funny. That has to be my motivation.

I did decide to cut the bawr-chikka-bou-bou music from the milking scenes. Though that may have been me forgetting I was going to do it in the first place.

So that’s that then. Two-thirds of the way through this very silly song. From here on in, they should get easier, because we’re no longer in the avian world. Which isn’t to say I actually have much of an idea for anything (lies; I have 12 sorted in my head), but I’m not as concerned with people dancing, leaping, or piping as I was with, oh, gold rings or swans.

Till tomorrow, fanclub.

As I mentioned on Twitter, if you can correctly name the movie Milton and Kranium are watching, you win some sort of prize. As I have just decided this, I have no idea what the prize will be. It will surely be valued under $10. It may not be edible.

So I had this idea, and then filmed, and then while I was waiting for the render to finish, I actually did some research about the subject matter. This is actually kind of a weird story, the story of the Ice Capades. Started in the 40s, it was hugely successful for decades, and largely featured a bunch of pro-skating with some odd themes thrown in. It was in the 80s that it started a decline, when they started sticking a bunch of Snorks on the ice, and when pro-skaters started their own tour that focused more on, you know, actual skating.

Ice Capades shut down in the mid-90s, and there have been multiple failed attempts to revive the franchise. However, Disney On Ice does still exist, and was never part of the Ice Capades company (one could argue that Disney On Ice are what truly killed any chance of Ice Capades making a comeback).

It wasn’t until hearing Milton say “Ice Capades” that I realized the name was a pun. Never even dawned on me that there’s no such thing as a capade until today.

Ballet on Ice is not even remotely a fake thing. Figure skaters often take ballet lessons, because of how closely related the two art forms are. Judging from Google search, Sleeping Beauty seems to be the most popular selection; overall there appears to be a thriving Ice Ballet scene. Just not as much of it in the US as in other nations.

To the best of my knowledge, however, the story of seven ice dancers nearly drowning from falling through the ice during a performance of Swan Lake is complete fiction.

All in all, I’m sort of sad I didn’t have an opportunity to research and write this one a bit more thoroughly. I’ll go ahead and admit now that a) I was a bit ignorant of the subject matter, and b) that I would be surprised if I didn’t rip off this material for some other project some day.

On an unrelated note, how odd it is that the 12 Days of Xmas span the New Year, and yet have no acknowledgement of it? It’s almost as though our obsession with celebrations based upon purely temporal events is a modern development devoid of any real cultural significance beyond a collective agreement of revelry.

Happy New Year anyway.

if xmas were two days earlier, new year’s eve would be 9 ladies dancing, which would be way more apropos

“Sixth” is a hard word to say.

And no. I couldn’t come up with a single idea for today. Or rather, I couldn’t come up with a single other idea. “Six geese a-laying” took on a filthy and ridiculous concept in my mind, and there was no shaking it. The central question of whether it’s three pairs of geese going at it, or some massive goose orgy, has not been resolved. Nor should it. I think it’s up to each person in this world to decide for themselves whether six geese a-laying are really two geese a-laying next to two other pairs of geese also a-laying, or if it’s six geese a-gettin’-their-freak-on.

If you’ve never thought of that before, you’ll certainly never be able not to think of it again. You’re welcome. A belated Xmas gift to you.

Tomorrow: Swans. Maybe I should just go see the new Aronofsky seven times.

I knew when I came up with the concept that this was going to be a little later posting than I’d hoped.

Yeah, this is one of those “It takes eight hours to shoot four minutes” videos. I’m not entirely happy with the sound, to be honest, but I hit a point where I just couldn’t work on it any longer.

Also possibly the most expensive episode of Jigsaw ever, as I had to buy $50 in D&D stuff. Had to, he said as if he didn’t relish the excuse to finally pick up the Red Box.

Just so you know, all four of them had actual characters generated with a combination of 4E player manuals. Most of the dice rolls are authentic as of writing the episode (earlier this afternoon). I decided not to knock Regibor prone because I didn’t want two prone minis on the game map; I just wanted Kranium’s fallen cleric on the ground, so I fudged the Hulking Zombie’s power. Like any good DM who wants to have a more poetic outcome.

And yes, I am contemplating doing an entire series of “Jigsaw plays D&D”, except I’d probably use Gamma World instead, because I just don’t have that many miniatures, and I’d much rather purchase weird mutants and robots than wizards and trolls. I mean, it’s a pretty slim margin there, but this shit’s expensive, yo.

Yes, this may be the most geeky I’ve ever been. Here, at least.

I must admit, this is one of those episodes where I don’t really know if it’s funny or not. Or if it makes sense at all.

I am pretty happy with Kranium’s bluetooth headset, though, which is a cap off a printer ink cartridge painted black and velcroed to his head. I’ll be keeping that prop; it seems every year or two I want to do a bit with Kranium talking on the phone. Maybe there’s a bit of Bob Newhart influence I never knew I had.

I decided not to make a joke about Charlie Parker only wanting to get his saxophone in order to sell it for heroin. I’d like to think I avoided this joke because it was in poor taste, but mostly I think I just couldn’t figure out how to get Kranium to say it. He’s a better man than I sometimes.

Five Gold Rings tomorrow. Originally referred to pheasants. No idea what it’ll refer to here. I’m almost tempted to work in Sonic the Hedgehog somehow. But that would require new props, or new puppets, or talking about a video game I actually hate. So maybe not.

25% of the way through the impromptu Jigsaw 12 Days of Xmas project, and it dawns on me that with each passing day it will become more and more difficult to do these things with only two hands. This realization happened as I was attaching chickens to my fingers with rubber bands so I could have them dance on Lump’s bed. Heck, I’m not even sure I’ll have enough rubber bands, if it comes to that. I’ll have to scrounge around.

The song is an original, recorded this morning. I took the first measure of the melody of the 12 Days of Xmas and riffed on it while thinking about Edith Piaf. Came out way better than it had any right to. Like so many things I do while hung over.

Now I have a bit of time to sit back and contemplate. Colly birds. Calling birds. Colly. Calling. Hmm.

I may have to go for the obvious jokes here. Hope you’ll forgive me.

This thought struck me in the car on the way out to my mom’s house on Xmas morning. I was cackling enough at the concept of four-legged dove turtles and their hideous, hideous cry that I figured I should share. Decided to push a bit more towards the horror-comedy, at least in concept.

And then I didn’t get started on the episode until almost 1am, so I’m too tired to have any idea whether it’s funny or not. I think it might just be disturbing. But I’m okay with that.

Anybody who draws the monstrous bird-phibians wins some sort of prize.

It’s a good thing I’ve got very little to do tomorrow. Gotta come up with something for French Hens. No idea what I’m going to do for Calling Birds. Or Colly Birds. Whatever the four birds are, I don’t know what that sketch is yet, either. Text me your ideas. I’ll probably not use them. But they make me giggle.

You know what I forgot to do this morning?

Yeah. Post the video to this blog. Not that the blog is terribly active, but I do hate it when I’m not thorough.

I mean, it auto-posted, but the auto-post doesn’t work great, and this is where the commentary track posts should go, so I really should upload them by hand.

Anyway. Yes. I decided to scrap season four continuity entirely and do a mini-season devoted to rough, mostly improvised sketches based on the 12 Days of Xmas.

It feels really nice to get back to “Whatever makes me laugh today” episodes.

Yes, that sample is an actual Red Legged Partridge, which is likely the species referred to in the original carol. It was easier to sample that than to try and mimic it myself, as I started losing my voice after filming (I blame it on the dehumidity).

So it’s two a.m., Xmas Day is fading into memory, and I can’t really think of anything to say about 12×01. It’s the first of twelve. I’ll not be planning any of them apart from random thoughts while driving or in the shower (or sledding, as it’s snowing here, and I actually got a sled, and a decent shovel, but that’s another story). Also, this episode only took one take, and gives me the giggles in that really good way that all my favorite episodes give me the giggles.

Making Kranium drunk was actually inspired by listening to the radio show Milton and Kranium hosted right before Xmas in, what, 2007? Kranium smelled a bit like Santa that night, too.

I’m writing this while I’m waiting for 12×02 to render. That’ll be up sometime in the morning. It’s a little less sweet, so you might not want to be snuggling while watching it. Or maybe that’ll help. I can’t really tell anymore.

Merry Xmas, all. More soon.

So, let me tell you a little story.

When I was plotting out season four, I knew that, no matter the filming schedule, there was a high likelihood that episode 405 would be due around the time of  a big trip (in this case, my long-standing engagement to go to Edinburgh Fringe for the entire month of August). I knew in terms of structure, I wanted Milton to do the episode, and that it should be somewhat shoddy-feeling; good, but not too good. Originally I was thinking it’d be a song, but then I got this idea.

The idea being that, as I was planning to be at the Fringe for a month, that I’d like to have some tiny, portable show that I could easily perform on the street in my free time. I started thinking about toy theaters, and how neat they were. And this one title kept going through my head – “Goldilocks and the Three Kraken.”

The first problem I ran into was with the script. I had no idea what the structure would be; I’ve been doing Jigsaw so long, I’m sort of used to two-handers, quick scenes of banter. This, on the other hand, is a long story with a single narrator. Actual narration and everything. And I had the problem of what to do with all those Krakenses. So while the first four episodes of the season were written, filmed, and posted a week early, I didn’t have the script for 405 finished until three days ago.

Which leads us to the second problem: illustrations. Toy Theater requires a ton of little drawings. Each time a character picks up a new prop, you either need a new drawing of the character with the prop, or a drawing of the prop. And the drawings need to be in a certain scale, so they all match each other. And you want a degree of consistency, so the characters all look like they’re in the same world. And I decided that, all things considered, all of this would be easier if I did everything in Illustrator.

A program I hadn’t used since, oh, 2003 maybe.

Eventually, after re-teaching myself how to use the program (and getting used to drawing with the Wacom tablet, which is, after all, what I bought it for), I ended up with 12 pages of little drawings of various weird characters. Which I then had to color. And print out. And print reverse copies of. And cut out. And glue together. And then, THEN, figure out how to operate. (I’d show you the sheet, but for some reason WordPress isn’t accepting image uploads, and I just DON’T HAVE TIME to figure it out right now.)

So now we’re up to Thursday afternoon. The episode is already twelve hours later than I wanted. I’ve spent two weeks solid working on it. Also, I’m supposed to be packing for Scotland. So yes, yesterday’s filming didn’t go as expected. The words “good enough” were uttered quite a bit, as were the words “Oh COME ON” and “DAMMIT DAMMIT DAMMIT” and “FUCK I SUCK”. By six I had all the footage in the can, having gone through about ninety minutes of tape (at one point during filming I rewound the tape twenty minutes because not one second of it was even worth looking at later). Having spent 30 of the past 35 hours doing nothing but work on the episode, I decided it would have to be a day late, because nothing I did at that point would be worth showing. I went to bed early.

This morning came the arduous task of trying to cut the episode into a decent length without losing any content (because to lose content would mean reshoots, and again, just no time). I managed to trim about a minute of weird pauses out of the performance, and added the little black bits to try and separate scenes a bit better. Then I put on the headphones and knocked out a Milton voiceover track.

I hate ADR. Trying to sync voice to a specific action is really annoying. Made more annoying by the fact that, during filming, I hadn’t had time to memorize the script, so I was constantly trying to watch the monitor, grab the puppets I needed, and read the lines, way more frantic than my normal shooting (something of an accomplishment). So there were weird rhythms and odd bounces and spots where the narration just don’t sync and can’t possibly do so. Firmly in “Just get it done” mode, I did as well as I could, and moved on.

Originally, the Milton/Kranium scene at the end was to be filmed. Once I had the toy theater show finished, I realized both a) that it was kind of nice to have just that, and b) filming a whole new scene would take way longer than I had time for. So I tried it as an audio track over the credits. For the most part, I think it works. Which is encouraging, considering one of the upcoming Jigsaw projects I’m contemplating. (teaser!)

In the end, I don’t what I think about this one. It’s better than I thought it was going to be yesterday evening, that’s for sure. I’m not sure it’s possible to do on the street in Edinburgh. I’ll take some new sheets and the updated script and see what I can put together. If it turns out to work, I’ll probably assemble all of the materials into a single pdf that people can download and construct. Even if it doesn’t work, I’ll probably do that. Why the hell not?

So to sum up:

-never try anything new
-especially if you’re supposed to leave for a different country soon
-and if you haven’t used the computer program you need in a really long time
-and you don’t even know how to do what you’re doing
-unless you plan on getting lucky and having it be kinda good anyway.

Oh, by the way, you can now buy Lump T-shirts. Right now, they’re selling at zero mark-up. So, you know, get one. Except you, Bill. I have a proposal for you that could put you in free Lump shirts for some time. We’ll talk when I get back.

See you after Scotland.

That fez was a gift from Gil Hova, like 12 years ago. You can’t tell, but it’s about to fall apart. Little, horrible bits of dry-rotted red felt were cascading out of the thing every time I bounced, getting in my eyes and turning my sweaty forehead into a gritty, bloody mess. I should probably toss it out. But it’s hard to throw away a fez.

What should I say about this episode? A lot of post production with the sound. A lot of time spent wiggling and jiggling the sounds. In the end, I’m not terribly happy with them, but you hit a point where you have to throw up your hands and say “Good enough.” Initially, I wanted Kranium to be building something, but the ratcheting noises I was doing just didn’t look right. (Noises didn’t look right? Yes. That’s what I said.) I settled on having him writing, which is not a foley I wish upon anyone with as spare and cheap a set-up as I have. As for Milton’s legs… let’s just try to retcon those out of our minds when I do finally manage a sound effect I truly like.

This episode also represents the last one of the pre-written scripts. 405 is conceptually finished, but the actual words are still… fluid? Is fluid a nice way of saying “I haven’t finished writing it yet”?  Fluid will have to do. I must admit, 405 is kicking me up and down the road with big, spiky boots. Largely because it’s a completely different kind of writing than I’m used to. Really, it’s the kind of thing I used to write decades ago, but those brainmeats are atrophied from disuse.

But anyway. Back to 404.

This was my favorite thing about making this episode:

I did first check to see if I could find an image in Google Image Search of a bear licking a kitten. But drawing it seemed somehow more betterer. And that’s when I remembered I owned a Wacom tablet. Sure, I use it exclusively rather than my crapped-out mouse. I just haven’t ever drawn anything with it before. Wasn’t absolutely sure where to start. Eventually, I’ll get to know Illustrator and do these drawings properly. For now, I just scribbled this in Photoshop in about five minutes (including color). It makes me giggle every time.

Speaking of my crapped-out mouse… okay. Back in episode 402, I discovered I had a need to cue up multiple video clips, one to start the episode with Milton watching it, one to be the weird gameshow countdown clock (that, okay, I didn’t need, because I’m not sure the joke actually works at all, although that is more the fault of my craptastic SFX job than the script, but anyhow I certainly couldn’t have predicted that as I was filming). Enter the wireless Logitech mouse.

This mouse has been with me for quite some time, and the rechargeable battery on it was about dead, meaning I’d have to charge it every four hours or so, which is no way to compute. The battery death led to the Wacom purchase eventually, and since then the mouse usually sits in its charging cradle for the rare occasion that I need to use a mouse for something (you can often see the mouse in the background of episodes shot in the main lab). Last season, I used it once to press play on a video clip before filming. For episode 402, I remembered that I could completely remap all of the buttons to different functions.

So I opened up VLC and made a playlist of the two videos I needed for the shoot. I remapped the left and right mouse buttons to flip back and forth between playlist items, and mapped the middle button to pause and play. I taped the mouse to the floor by my foot. So, while filming, I was able to start and stop the video playback with my toe, and skip to the track I needed, all without having to get up.

Except I would have to get up occasionally, if I let the last video finish playing, because then VLC would revert to neutral and I’d have to open up the videos again and resize the window to fit the lab monitor cut-out. But it did save a bunch of work, and meant I could cue up multiple videos during filming. Even if the edit meant I only actually needed one up at a time.

Sigh.

BUT I WAS TALKING ABOUT 404.

This script started out a lot longer, if you can believe it. I’m not used to having these characters have heavy moments. Kranium’s monologue is very much the thing that runs on repeat inside my head whenever I’m not creating things. Maybe minus the alien invasions. The sentiment is real, at any rate. It also touches upon my thoughts on the value of entertainment. It’s hard, sometimes, to justify wiggling dolls in the air in front of a video camera when the world is so filled with horrible things. I could be feeding the hungry, or cleaning oil off of pelicans, or building homes with Habitat, or protesting mountaintop removal in the coal industry. But frankly, I’m better at wiggling dolls in the air than I am at any of those things. And I may not have a huge audience, but presumably those of you watching this (many of whom ARE feeding the hungry, saving wildlife, building things, preserving things, protesting things) find some value in what I do. A five-minute respite from the heaviness and importance of the world and the work we do in it. Even if it’s just five silly minutes about a robot shouting a lot, if it makes someone’s day easier to handle, I have to believe that’s worth the time and effort I’m putting into it.

So. On to 405, where Milton will put on a puppet show of his own. It should be up at the normal time. Provided I can get it built. And filmed. Before then. Yikes.

If it turns out well, I’ll be taking Milton’s puppet show to Scotland with me. More on that next week.

My video host, blip.tv, have some really cool features for their users. One thing you can do is look at viewership stats second by second, to see where people tend to stop watching, or to see what bit people, upon rewatching, skip to. And sometime last year, I went through the videos and collected a rough list of “Things That Seem To Hurt Ratings.” The list included:

-songs
-long explanations of stuff
-title cards
-Milton shouting

So as you can see, I’m working my way through the list and putting everything in there.

This was a fun episode in terms of exploring some new camera set-ups, trying to use a few basic set pieces and create multiple spaces out of them. It wasn’t my initial thought going into season four, but it seems that this season I’m going to be trying to get away from my patented one-shot look. It’s been so long since I’ve thought in terms of multiple camera angles that I’m having to really think about how it all works. This is going to be more obvious in 404, where I needed to match turns and compose over the shoulder shots that didn’t distract and still have angles that allowed important action to be visible. You know, stuff filmmakers have to worry about. Anyway, it’s an interesting experiment.

One nice thing is, of course, I don’t have to try and get through three pages of dialogue without a mistake. I don’t know if my performances are getting better on the puppetry side of things yet, because I’m still getting used to the monitor. But by the end of the season, it’ll be interesting to look back and see if there has been any improvement.

My character voices are out of shape, though. That much is for true. They’re all slowly drifting back towards my voice, and it’s something I need to work on.

The other thing I really need is a double-jointed right arm. It can either be a transplant, or some bionic upgrade, but I’m finding with these weird camera angles that I’m not physically able to get all the movement I want out of both puppets. Yes, the answer would be to hire another puppeteer, and put the stage more than four feet off the ground. Sure. That would be the SMART way. But I’m too full of myself for that. Clearly.

And yes, I am strangely obsessed with Hell’s Kitchen. I hate the format, I hate the way reality shows twist all human interaction into a horrid middle school cafeteria incident, but Ramsay… there’s just something about Ramsay that I can’t deny. His passion for food and complete intolerance for incompetence is strangely comforting. Sometimes, when I can’t yell at all the idiots surrounding me for fear of social repercussions, it’s nice to let Gordon do it for me.

Let me just offer my sincere apologies to everyone who actually thought I was ending the series. There was a surprisingly large number there, judging by the comments across the internets.

Let me also thank Andrew over at PuppetVision Blog for his exceedingly warm and encouraging post welcoming back Jigsaw. He’s been a great supporter over the years, not to mention an amazing resource for new puppet work online and off. I’m thrilled that his hiatus has also come to an end.

Now. To the episode at hand. What should I talk about.

In my quest to push myself to do new and different things with every season of Jigsaw, I have made some alterations that you may notice, and some you may not. On the list of obvious things is the new secondary set; you saw it in 401, behind Lump, you see bits of it in the montage here, and will see it again in 403. It’s nice to have a monitor-free set to shoot against once in a while, both because I wanted to be able to have a standard secondary location, and also because it’s sometimes a pain to come up with stuff to put on the lab monitor.

Side note: why do all the new Apple products have to be so damn shiny? The old lab monitor, a c.2006 iMac, had a lovely matte finish to the screen, so when I was shooting, you got almost no reflection. Now it’s like I’ve put an obsidian mirror on set. It took me maybe two hours just to light the lab for Milton & Lump’s scene, because the screen was throwing things off. No grood. Anyway.

One thing you may not consciously notice but that I think will come across over time is that I’ve started using a bit more of a professional monitor technique while filming. Up until episode 401, I have only ever been able to see my performance live by squinting at the flip-out viewfinder on my camera. That meant a lot of rewinding and rewatching and resetting scenes, not to mention the fact that it was mirrored, so the thing I was barely watching didn’t match the final film. But recently I bought a little Toshiba portable DVD player that has a line in, and now I have a large screen that sits right in front of me and shows me what I’m doing. As any TV puppeteer will tell you, monitor work is tricky, because you have to train your brain to go right when you want to go left, or rather go right when your brain thinks going right means going left, or something. To get an idea, open up a webcam and flip the image so it’s showing you as you really are, rather than a mirror image. Now, try and comb your hair.

Yeah. That’s the trick.

Point being, you get a much better sense of your own performance watching a live feed. You also get a better sense of screen composition, so you can make the effort to balance the shot while you’re shooting (instead of my old method of watching the take afterwards, then trying to adjust from memory during the next take). At least, that’s the idea. It’s still a pretty new skillset, and I don’t pretend to be great at it yet. Hopefully, you’ll be able to see the end result in better puppetry and better overall look for the show. Or it’ll look basically the same, only it’ll take me less time to film. As a worst case scenario, the latter ain’t bad.

Oh, and to answer some questions you might have about the final sequence: no plans, about a day, gaff taped to the hood, twelve or so, the lost and found bin, melodica, yes, GarageBand, two, advert and chunkfive. If I missed an answer, leave the corresponding question in the comments.

I’ll let you in on a little secret, since you actually follow this rather sad little blog:

This isn’t actually the last episode of Jigsaw.

Yeah, I know. Shocker. If June hadn’t decided to heat up to Dave’s Syndrome levels early on, I would have had this episode up and posted just before heading off for the O’Neill Puppetry Conference, meaning it would have been sitting up for two or three weeks, alone, lingering and sad, making people wonder about the actual future of the show. Part of me wants to milk the suspense. The rest of me wants to actually get work done.

So we’re rocking the Thursday slot again for Season Four. It’s been so long since there was a regular Jigsaw season, I don’t even remember what day of the week was normal. But I’m pretty sure there were Thursdays involved at some point in the past, so that’s what I’m going with.

In the meantime, I don’t think it’s severe spoilerism to tell you that Season Four will be the full 20 episodes you may have come to expect. The first five episodes are already completely scripted, and the back fifteen are outlined. You’ll get at least the first five a week at a time. There may, or may not, be a lull between 405 and 406; I’m heading to Edinburgh Fringe for the month of August, so it will depend on how many episodes I manage to get in the can before I need to get on a plane. No matter what, episodes will resume production in September, and the season will finish up before Xmas. There are no plans yet for another Xmas special, but we all know how much I adore Xmas, so odds are decent enough.

Although episode 401 isn’t the last episode, I am allowing for the possibility that this may be the final season. Or at least, the final season of the show in its current form. To be honest, the puppets aren’t in great shape, and I’ll need to get with some serious builders in order to figure out how to reproduce them in a sturdier form. Kranium, while not terribly hard to rebuild, will involve some financial investment to make him out of better (lighter) parts. Lump, well, I need to find the right fur and deconstruct the existing puppet somehow. For a rather shapeless puppet, Lump is surprisingly specific in his look. It could take some time.

Milton, of course, is in fine shape. Some cosmetic blemishes, but the puppet is a few years younger than the rest. Should Dr. K and Lump have to take an extended medical leave, Milton will be on hand to entertain in one way or another. But all of this is very far in the future, and nothing is set in stone by any means. The season has only begun, after all.

Next Thursday will see episode 402, tentatively titled “That’s My Lump”. I just wrapped the edit on one video sequence that makes me giggle rather unexpectedly. And I’m staring at Lump’s costume right now, wondering what twist of fate brought all of the elements into my possession without even having to think, let alone actively look for them. There’s just one incredibly tricky thing I haven’t sussed yet, but I’ve got some ideas. I’m hoping I don’t have to learn green screen in order to do it. All these years without resorting to chromakey, it would seem like cheating to start now.

Anyway. Welcome back. All seven of you.

I was just going to have an episode suddenly appear next Thursday, but when I saw this video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

…I knew Kranium had to respond.

So yeah. New season starts next week. Yay.